There’s a scene in Samantha Harvey’s 2023 book “Orbital” in which an astronaut on the International Space Station tells his daughter that progress is beautiful. She argues with him, pointing out that progress has led to creations such as the atomic bomb. The astronaut responds, “You didn’t ask if progress is good, and a person is not beautiful because they’re good, they’re beautiful because they’re alive. Alive and curious and restless.”
As I write this, four astronauts are hurling themselves towards the dark side of the Moon, flying farther into space than any human has ever been before. The Artemis II mission is sending humans outside of Earth’s orbit for the first time since 1972. The NASA website reads, “[…] NASA will send Artemis astronauts on increasingly challenging missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.”
I am incredibly locked in on the 10-day trip these astronauts are taking, as they prepare for their lunar fly-by aboard the Orion capsule, which they have nicknamed “Integrity.” I watched the launch on my laptop in the library and downloaded the NASA app to receive daily updates and track their progress in real time.
There is something so breathtakingly human about this mission to me, this desire to see things the naked eye has never seen before. The majesty of the whole endeavor has rendered me incapable of knowing whether this is a good thing; do we really need to spend these resources to photograph parts of the Moon that might be completely shadowed? I have no idea.
The one thing I do know is this: Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took a photo of Earth from the Orion spacecraft window the other day. You can see two auroras in the image, as Earth eclipses the sun. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life.
As I approach the final days of my time at Occidental, the “end times” (as I’ll dramatically call them), I’m tempted to ascribe a value judgment to my college experience in general. Some days, I wake up and think, “Graduation, good! And college was good!” Other days… well, I won’t falsely claim ever to think that graduating is a negative thing, but there are moments when I worry about how I’ve spent these last four years.
Have I done enough, learned enough? Learned the right things? Did I study abroad in the right place? Have I unwittingly separated myself from the “real” world and from my community, from who I was before I stepped foot on this campus? I say words like “ontology” at least once a day now. Who have I become?
Only recently has it felt true to me that the goodness of my movement towards the future, in college and afterward, is not the only attribute of my progress I should focus on. Whether or not I have done the most “good” or become the most “good” (which feels different from the “best”) version of myself I could be in this moment, I have done a bang-up job at becoming, at moving forward. I could not be justly accused of a lack of growth. I don’t know, and I can’t really ever know, if I’ve ended up being the exact person my first-year self wanted to be, but I think (and hope and pray) that I would be proud of the pure distance I’ve traveled, the ground I’ve covered.
In August, I’m starting a doctorate program and will work toward a degree that no one in my family has earned before. In hurling myself forward, farther than my ancestors and I have ever been, I am beautiful. Hopefully, I am hurling myself towards something good, but the thrust itself, the enormous energy it takes to make any progress at all, is proof that I’m alive.
On Day 6 of the Artemis II mission, the crew will lose contact with the Earth for about 40 minutes as they pass behind the Moon. They will take photos and videos of what they see to share with us afterward, but for almost an hour, I will be holding my breath in anticipation, waiting for four other humans to tell me, and all of us, what they saw.
As they enter their return trajectory, the crew of the Orion spacecraft will most certainly be coming back different people than they were when they first launched. They will come back with more knowledge and experience, and maybe their lust for the stars will be satisfied.
I believe, just as I believe for myself as I return from this mission and embark on another, that they will come back more curious and restless than ever before. They will come back more beautiful.
Contact Ava LaLonde at lalonde@oxy.edu
